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The Black Book, by Orhan Pamuk

Some time ago I posted about Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (2002) which I very much enjoyed. I noted then that Pamuk is Turkey’s foremost writer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. The Black Book is a much earlier work (1990), which I read in a (relatively) new translation by Maureen Freely (2006). I found it much more difficult than the later book, though I’m still trying to figure out exactly why.

It is 1980. Galip, a lawyer, lives in Istanbul with his beautiful wife Rüya, his cousin whom he has known since childhood. Her main occupation seems to be reading detective stories, both Turkish and Western. One day she disappears, leaving only an enigmatic note. Galip begins to search for her, and becomes convinced that she is hiding somewhere in Istanbul with her much older half-brother, Celál, a popular journalist. But Celál also seems to have disappeared. Galip feels there is some mystery he has to solve if he is ever to find them. For most of the book, each alternative chapter is one of Celál’s newspaper columns; Galip feels sure the answer to the mystery can be found in them.

Galip’s search takes him all over Istanbul, allowing Pamuk to display his love of the city – its life, its ruins, its riches, its poverty and ‘the melancholy of its rainy streets’. Here he is covering much the same ground as in his autobiographical book Istanbul, where he recounts his childhood in the suburbs adjacent to the Bosphorus, with their wooden buildings, cobbled lanes, palaces and mosques, and his family’s crumbling apartment block. And the importance of ‘the garden of memory’ is a theme of this book, much as it is in Istanbul.

Apparently this is a sort of mystery story, described in the back cover blurb as turning the detective novel ‘on its head’. In his search, Galip sometimes thinks of himself as being like a detective in a Hollywood film, or in one of Rüya’s books. But there is no process of detection that is recognisable to me, either way up. Instead, Galip seeks his cousin through an attempt to understand signs and symbols that he sees everywhere, including in people’s faces. Each face has letters hidden in it, but what such letters reveal is not at all clear to me; Pamuk never says. There is also an emphasis on the fluidity of identity, with Galip obsessed with being someone else, and many allusions to aliases and disguises, lifelike mannequins and masks. Many of the columns are stories about people who have escaped, or wish to escape from themselves, like the man who wrote a novel about a man who changes places with his double, and finds himself in a world where everything is a copy of something else. Celál writes of a time when he remembers ‘not being myself: instead I was imitating the man who was nothing more than the sum total of all those people I was imitating.’ And as Galip himself notes: ‘If objects and images and the symbols on plastic carrier bags could be signs of something else, if Celál’s columns could suggest new meanings with every reading, it followed his own life would take on a new meaning every time he thought about it, and as he contemplated this endless freight train of meanings mercilessly multiplying itself into infinity, he feared he might lose himself inside it for ever.’ Quite so.

I can’t help feeling I’m missing something important here. Maybe my expectations are too narrow – too much based on anticipation of logical plot development. Or to paraphrase John Buchan, maybe ‘a clue may be dumb in London and shout aloud’ at Istanbul. Maybe the book means more to Turkish readers who know their own history than it does to me, and all the reference to signs with multiple meanings has itself a deeper meaning. As Maureen Freely points out in her translator’s note, the book is set in 1980 – just before a military coup, ‘one of the darkest moments of recent Turkish history’. Is Celál’s disappearance part of a conspiracy? Is it likely that a writer with as keen a political eye as Pamuk shows he has in Snow would choose to set his story in 1980 unless he was making a political point? If he is, I do not, alas, know what it is. All those signs and symbols, and what they do or don’t signify suggest perhaps a satire on the literary theory of deconstruction, but if so, I’m equally lost. Pamak believes that story telling is central to identity, memory and history – so maybe we should just enjoy the stories in which the book abounds.

Here’s a review from The Guardian by someone who understood the book better than I did – or at least differently. Spoiler alert: it tells you much more about the story than I have. You can also read more about Orhan Pamuk on his informative website here.